Then we stopped all bunched up together while the leaders opened a door made of stone, and we stepped out under billowing monsoon night clouds, on a steep ridge some three hundred yards above Nangpa La. Down in the pass was a line of decrepit chortens, and tall skinny poles that had once held prayer flags. Watching them I caught sight of movement, and a faint high whistle wafted past us, making the hair on my forearms stand out from the skin. “Whoah,” says I, and George hissed “Ambush!” But the colonel only shook his head.
“Yetis,” he said. “The Manjushri Rimpoche has enlisted their aid.”
“Shit,” George said. But there was nothing he could do about it at this point. Down in the pass shapes shifted and disappeared and that was all we saw of them anyway, and quickly we were down in the pass, stepping on exposed rocks so there would be no footprints to indicate where we had come from.
Among the chortens we split into two groups, and took off down both sides of the pass. After that it was a matter of keeping up with the colonel, who was pretending he was in his Land Rover, running everywhere he could, shouting at us and hauling ass over talus slopes and through cold clunking glacial streams, following the ancient traders’ trail.
A few hours later we reached the rhododendron forest above Chhule. Rain had knocked down all the flowers and they lay matted on the forest floor like busted birthday balloons, thousands of them so that the ground was pink and the sky was a billowing cloudy white, strongly backlit by a full moon. Between the pink ground and the white sky hundreds of black gnarly rhododendron branches twisted up into a light wet snow that began to fall. It was a weird place, and when the moon shone through the wrack like a streetlight it only looked weirder—pink ground, twisty black shapes, falling snow, clouds racing across the moon, and every once in a while, shapes moving in the corner of the eye.
At the low edge of the forest we were on the outskirts of Chhule, and the barracks that housed the Nepali Army were on our side of the village, just on the other side of a narrow clearing—three long two-story stone buildings with sheet-metal roofs and wood-frame windows, all peacefully asleep in the depths of an ordinary village night. Somewhere in the village a mastiff was barking, but that happened every night in every village in Nepal, so there was nothing to worry about from him.
Silently we began to spread out along the forest’s edge, following the colonel’s instructions. He set the mortar teams in a semicircle facing in on the barracks, putting me and George at one end of the semicircle, behind a short fat old rhododendron. He chuckled grimly at the sight of the barracks roofs. “Gonna sound like we’re bashing them in the head with trashcan lids. Here, take masks—you’ll be off in their peripheral vision.”
He gave us demon masks and flashlights and we put on the masks, and luckily our demons had pop eyes so enormous that the cut holes of the pupils were big enough to see through. George was transformed into a green red blue and gold horror, grinning with three or four times as many teeth as he should have had. And I suppose I looked much the same. Once the fracas began we were supposed to shoot two mortar rounds off, and then slink around amongst the trees, flashing the flashlights up at our faces for some subliminal negative advertising and then dropping behind trees to dodge any fire that we might draw.
Great plan. Although George didn’t think much of it. And when he took the cannonball rocks out of his backpack to load our mortar, he was even less impressed. “Freds, what is this? Can you see this? These rocks, they’re blue! Aren’t they blue?” He shined his flashlight on them for a second. “Freds, these are turquoise!”
He ran through the trees and caught up with the colonel and dragged him back. “Colonel, what the hell are we doing bombing these guys with turquoise?”
The colonel already had on a particularly grotesque demon mask, but somehow it was obvious that the wild grin on its face was perfectly matched underneath. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” the colonel said. “They’ll come running out of those barracks and see this stuff scattered everywhere, and they’ll think the sky is falling. They’ll go stark raving mad with fear.”
No reply from George.
Finally he shook his head violently, skewing his mask, and in a muffled voice he said, “Colonel, doesn’t it seem to you that, you know, perhaps bombing these guys with turquoise is going to make it hard for them, tomorrow morning, to understand the night as a raid by the Chinese Army—”
But before he had managed to finish the question and get his mask readjusted the colonel was off, and had given the whistle that was the signal to start the attack, and one of the Khampas wearing a mask that had been beat particularly hard with the ugly stick had snuck up to one of the windows and put his face up against it and flashed his flashlight into the room and then at his face and shrieked, and that was the signal for all of us to fire our mortars, in a ragged volley that lasted about half a minute. The Khampa at the window hauled ass back into the trees and the riflemen opened fire and shot out all the barracks windows, and then a dozen mortar loads of turquoise came whistling down out of the sky and a few of them at least landed on those metal roofs and they began to boom horrendously under the impact. All the while we demons were dancing between the trees flashing lights on our faces, and from inside the barracks there came cries of mindless panic to warm the colonel’s heart for several incarnations to come.
So everything was going great for a couple of minutes at least, but unfortunately one of the demons got carried away and ran up to the nearest barracks to stare in a broken window, feeling a demonic invulnerability that was sadly misplaced because someone inside shot him. He fell back and being nearest to him George and I ran out into the clearing and grabbed him up. His right arm was bloody and it seemed to me he was in very serious pain until I recalled his mask. Black clouds had rolled overhead and it was as dark as it got that night, snowing hard and crazy with the sound of gunfire, and our demon comrade was just indicating he could walk on his own when whump, there was rock falling all over us. Hit by friendly fire, we were. I got whanged hard in the shoulder and back and the Khampa jerked sideways, but George took the brunt of it. Luckily the colonel’s turquoise cannonballs tended to shatter into fragments on being fired, so that they came down like birdshot rather than bowling balls. Still, enough landed on George that he crashed to the ground, felled by what looked to be the raw material for several dozen turquoise earrings.
He was cut up around the back of the head and the shoulders, and was lucky to have been wearing his mask, because it was all bashed up. Knocked out cold, too. Now our wounded Khampa buddy had to help us, and he used his good arm and I got on the other side of George, and we dragged him back into the rhododendron forest right quick.
After that things got confused. Loud ceremonial fireworks were going off over the Nepali barracks, and their roofs still banged horribly, but I could only begin to conclude that there were in fact some Gurkhas stationed in Chhule, because a group came charging out of one of their barracks unimpressed by our firepower and unaware that the sky was falling, and they started shooting at us with very loud brrrp brrrps that seemed to indicate very big guns indeed, and rhododendron branches began to rain down left and right.
Now since the Manjushri Rimpoche had ordered us to avoid killing any of these Nepali soldiers there was nothing to be done at this point but to beat a very hasty retreat, while shooting back all the while in demon Chinese Army style. Our comrades did this, but the wounded demon and I were having a tough time of it with George, who had come to but was clumsy and confused, staggering along between us mumbling incoherently as if his drubbing had put him on the very short path to enlightenment, but I doubted it. He was simply stunned, and we were losing ground on the colonel and the Khampas.
I crashed into an abandoned mortar, still steaming in the snow. Brrrp brrrps spiked into us like nails of fear, and branches snapped overhead to emphasize that this reaction was not inappropriate. I decided we had to fire another mortar round at the Nepalis, although now I am not sure why, and I had
the explosives charge and wadding jammed down into the barrel before I discovered there were no chunks of turquoise or rock of any kind left in the area.
So we were crouched behind a tree trunk letting George catch his breath and thinking it was all over when without a sound we were suddenly joined by short dark figures, with long arms and funny heads. I had almost melted from under my mask with fright, when I saw that one of them was wearing an L.A. Dodgers baseball cap.
“Buddha!” I said.
“Na-mas-tayyy,” he said in his squeaky little voice.
I took off my demon mask and grabbed up his skinny hand, too overwhelmed to be surprised.
“What?” said George. “What?”
“We’ve got some help,” I told him, and in a considerable hurry I indicated to Buddha that the mortar should be loaded with rocks, using a wadded handful of fallen rhododendron blossoms as an example. He misunderstood me and he and three or four of his bros quickly stuffed the barrel entirely full with matted blooms. “What the hell” said I and fired them off, and then the yetis had us picked up and we were hauling ass uphill through the forest, leaving the Gurkhas behind to figure out why it was snowing rhododendron mush.
Halfway up the glacial valley we caught up with the colonel and the Khampas and our yeti companions dropped us, suddenly skittish at the proximity to so many strangers with guns, Shambhala allies or no. “Thanks, Buddha!” I called after their disappearing forms, and then the wounded Khampa and I hustled George upvalley after the rest of our band. The Khampa called to them in Tibetan and they waited for us, and then the Gurkhas were within firing distance again and we were off to the races, headed for Nangpa La as fast as we could.
It began to snow and rain both, and an hour later we found that one stream we had forded on the way down was now unfordably high. We struck out upstream and found a stand of trees near a narrow spot in the flow, so the Khampas cut down two trees and dropped them across the water onto a prominent boulder on the other side. The colonel crawled over first and secured the tips of the trees the best he could. Then we sent George across this impromptu bridge, but in doing so he shoved the trees apart and was about to slip between them into the stream, wrecking the bridge in the process. He caught an arm and a leg over each tree, and was stuck. “Hold on!” the colonel shouted at him furiously. “Don’t move! Don’t let go!” And in Tibetan he ordered the rest of the Khampas to come on across. Most did it without stepping on George but by no means all. When we were all over the colonel and I crawled back out and dragged George over the two trees to safety.
The experience seemed to have roused George from his stupor—he had shifted from muttering “What, what, what” to saying very distinctly, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
“Well,” I said, trying to cheer him up, “at least we weren’t wearing crampons.”
No reply from George.
Now we were over the largest of the streams, and could beat a retreat up to Nangpa La without too much trouble. In fact, we got into the pass with everything timed so nicely that you would have thought it had all been going according to plan, and who knows maybe the colonel thought that it had, because we arrived in the pass with the Gurkhas hot on our tail, and Kunga Norbu’s party came hauling up out of Tibet with the Chinese Army hot on their tail, and we slipped up the ridge and ducked into our tunnel and slammed shut the door, leaving the Gurkhas and Chinese to sort things out if they could. “They’ll end up killing each other,” I said to the colonel.
“Good,” he snarled.
So then it was back through the tunnels, dragging every step of the way. It was lucky for George that it was a downhill run, because when we got to Grand Central Station and then the basement of the monastery, we walked out into clear morning light, which meant we had run all night long. This was standard Khampa guerrilla raid style—I suppose we had done about fifty miles in the previous eighteen hours, and been shot at for fifteen of them. I was beat, and George was devastated. He looked like he still had his demon mask on, and one of the gorier ones at that, face all puffy and bruised and bloody, mouth clenched in a scowl and eyes popped out with disbelief that he had taken part in any such expedition as ours had been.
But we were back.
* * *
Lhamo and the rest of the villagers took good care of George. For several days he crashed at Lhamo’s house in a fever, moaning and groaning, and Sindu and her kid hung around helping Lhamo feed him and wipe his face, being careful to avoid the cuts and bruises which Dr. Choendrak was tending in standard doctor style, stitches and everything.
Dr. Choendrak also decided to take on George’s dysentery once and for all, and he dosed him with the rinchen ribus, the Precious Pills. These pills are composed of a hundred and sixty-five ingredients, including precious metals ground to powder as well as a great number of medicinal plants, and they come wrapped in colored cotton tied with rainbow-colored thread sealed with wax. It takes twenty druggists up to three months to concoct them, and they are so strong that generally they wipe the patient out for a day while they rearrange the balance of his interior. George was wiped out completely for five days, and for a while Dr. Choendrak was really worried about him. But eventually he got up and around, a mere shadow of his former self, stick-limbed and with a scraggly bearded face that looked like midget axe murderers with tiny axes had been after him.
* * *
We got a break in the monsoon, several sunny days in a row, and George spent the time on the lookout rock above the laundry pool, watching the locals live their lives. He was still kind of sick, and he didn’t have much energy, but up there he didn’t need it. New arrivals at the pool would greet him in Tibetan and he would reply in English, and everyone was happy with this arrangement. A lot of the time he slept on his rock like a cat.
In the meanwhile Colonel John went down to Kathmandu, and when he came back, I went up to George all excited. “Hey,” says I, “do you want to hear what we did?”
“I know what we did,” he says darkly.
“But do you want to read about it in The International Herald Tribune?”
“What?”
I held out the battered issues of the paper that the colonel had brought back with him. “Looks like there was a fair bit of fallout,” I said as George hustled down off his rock and snatched them up.
The first one was from July 29th, three days after our raids. Back on one of the inner pages was a little article titled “Nepal Protests Alleged Border Incursion by Chinese,” and the headline basically told the story.
The very next day it had moved onto the front page—“Beijing Accuses India of Attack on Tibet,” on top of a pretty sizable article, describing the charges and countercharges of the two countries. Apparently the Chinese felt that the attack on their border post had been made by the Indians’ Special Frontier Force, going through Nepal so as to make it look like it wasn’t them. And the Indians felt that this whole charge was a lie to cover a Chinese attack on Nepal, which being on their side of the Himalaya they considered to be an attack on their own security.
So far so good. But the Tribbie for August 2nd had a big top-of-the-front-page headline which read “TROOPS MASS ON CHINA-INDIA BORDER.”
“Oh my God,” George said as he ripped through the article, and as he read it he kept on saying that, in higher and higher keys.
A good portion of the front page was devoted to that article and related side articles, describing the disappearance of the DMZ on the India-China border in Kashmir, the unprecedented deployment of Indian troops in Sikkim, and also how the Pakistanis had warned the Indians not to mess with their buddies the Chinese, while the Soviets had warned the Chinese not to fuck with their buddies the Indians. “Oh my God,” George kept saying.
And then the next day’s paper was practically nothing but the border crisis, all in big type, and even allowing for the fact that this was the Hong Kong edition of the Trib, with a resulting emphasis on Asian affairs, it still had to be admitted that this was a major league cr
isis. Clashes between Indian and Chinese and Indian and Pakistani forces had been reported, some of them really serious. And American satellite photos showed massive troop build-ups on the Soviet-Chinese border.
“Oh my GOD,” George said. “Where’s the next day? Where’s the next day?”
“That’s all the colonel brought back.”
“What? He left in the middle of all this? Without telling anyone that we started it? It’s been, what?” He checked the date. “Five days! Oh my God.”
He ran back down to the village and called Colonel John an idiot. “Damn it, we could have just started World War Three!” he shouted at him.
It turned out the colonel didn’t much care. He figured that World War Three was one of the few ways Tibet could get out from under the boot of the Chinese, and if that’s what it took, it was okay by John.
George ripped him for this. “What would the Manjushri Rimpoche say if you told him that! He’d throw you right out of this valley!”
Which was probably true. But the colonel just stuck out his lower lip stubbornly. He knew the Rimpoche would kick his ass for such a selfish sentiment, but he wasn’t going to lie—that’s how he felt about it. If the world wouldn’t stop a case of genocide when it was staring them in the face, then fuck ’em. Let them eat nukes.
George was so furious he couldn’t talk. He went over and kicked one of the stone and sod walls lining the village street so hard that several stones in the top row fell off. Then he threatened to go tell the Rimpoche of John’s murderous hopes, if the colonel didn’t drive us back down to Kathmandu immediately.
John was agreeable, and so that night we were over the pass and down to the Land Rover, hustling all the way until I feared George would drop, and the next afternoon we were back in Thamel, where life seemed to be going on just as if we were nowhere near the brink of World War Three, although in Kathmandu that meant nothing. Armageddon could have happened the week before and Kathmandu would probably not yet be aware of it. It would be the last place to know.
Escape From Kathmandu Page 22